Painted Chair with Vase; George C. Andrews; Mixed media;1986.
ing everything in sight. Though Jim Orr made plans for his children's education, Jessie was more casual about such matters and allowed George to quit school after finishing the third grade. He worked around the house, did odd jobs for local families, and always painted. He didn't think about making "art!' he says,"it was just something I had to do:' During the Depression, the On family lost most of their money and land, except for 60 acres on which Jim built three little houses. One was for Jessie, one for himself, and one for George, who by that time had married Viola Perryman, the daughter of a middleclass black family from Plainview, a small community near Madison. Soon Viola, an independent-minded woman, began to feel the constraints of living in such close proximity to the strongwilled Jessie. Often mother and wife clashed, with George caught in the middle. Some of these clashes had to do with the children, who had begun arriving in the late 1920s. While Viola desperately wanted them to get an education, Jessie never saw the purpose of such ambitions. In spite of her mother-in-law, Viola encouraged them to read and write, but also left them alone to invent their own imaginary games. One of her favorite stories concerns Benny as a two-year-old."We couldn't afford toys — toys were what wealthy people had — so I gave him two bottles about three inches high, one filled with water. He sat there for an hour or more simply pouring water from one bottle into the other. And he never lost a drop!'(Raymond still insists that his brother missed his calling. "With this pouring skill, Benny would have made a great moonFall 1990
shiner," he says.) The children's major pastime was drawing. Viola recalls, "Whenever we could spare a few dimes, we bought one or two pencils, a 5-cent package of paper and a 10-cent box of colored crayons:'They drew comic strips, illustrated stories, and (following their father's example) sometimes decorated objects around the house. When tablet
paper ran out, they used brown paper bags that had been brought back from the store. They also collected things: comic books, bottles, buttons, pictures cut from magazines. The latter especially excited Benny."As far back as I can remember, I wanted to do art work. But back then, I visualized it as being an illustrator. Illustrations were the only thing I saw. I didn't want to be a cartoonist, I wanted to do things that were much more representational:' Another family talent was telling stories. Of the two parents, the preferred storyteller was George. With him, even the familiar stories never turned out the same way twice; he invariably gave them a new twist. In contrast, Viola's stories were more predictable, and often included some religious element, which grew stronger over the years. Church was very important to her, as it was to most black people in the South. The only place where blacks could come together as a community, it embodied a mysterious power. Many religious or semi-religious figures — preachers, evangelists, Sunday Schoolteachers, people on the "mourner's bench!' undertakers — would later resurface in Benny Andrews' work. In 1943, after much urging, Viola finally got her husband to consent to move off the family compound and into a sharecropper's shack a few miles away. According to Benny, it "was like jumping out of the frying pan, into the fire. Before that we'd had chores, but when we moved to the sharecropping farm, everybody worked. It was like servitude. We were given 60 acres of land to plant cotton on, plus an acre to have for our own garden. But we were always obligated to do day labor for the 39